Her stomach turned to ice. She expected shouting, insults, rage. She braced for it. But Kate wasn’t angry. Her voice was composed, deliberate. She told Rebecca she knew about the affair. She knew about the pregnancy. She didn’t accuse or humiliate her. She simply said, “I’d like to meet. There’s something important you need to know.”
Against all logic, Rebecca agreed. She didn’t tell Jack. Something in her wanted the truth from someone besides him.
The moment she walked into the café, she understood why the call had felt so heavy. Kate was already seated—but she wasn’t alone. Two kids sat beside her, a teenage girl and a boy around ten. Lily and Randall. Jack’s children.
The kids smiled at Rebecca warmly, completely unaware of who she really was. That’s when Kate, with a calmness that was almost unsettling, said, “This is Rebecca. Your dad’s mistress.”
The words landed like a punch. Not cruel, not loud, just true.
Rebecca wanted to disappear. But Kate wasn’t there to shame her. She had come with purpose.
Once the children wandered off to the pastry counter, Kate explained everything Rebecca had never been told. The marriage hadn’t crumbled recently—it had been dead for years. Jack had cheated before. More than once. And the biggest shock: Kate and Jack were already divorced. Had been for five months. He just didn’t bother mentioning it to Rebecca. He wasn’t “figuring things out.” He wasn’t “waiting for the right time.” He simply never corrected the story because the lie served him better.
Rebecca felt her heart crack in a new way—not heartbreak, but humiliation. All the nights she had cried over the idea of being “the other woman,” all the anxiety about hurting someone, all the shame—meanwhile, he had already pulled the paperwork.
But the real curveball came from the kids.
Lily sat back down, held Rebecca’s gaze, and said softly, “We want to meet our baby sister.”
Rebecca had no words. She hadn’t expected grace—not from the woman whose marriage she helped unravel, and definitely not from the children.
Kate then laid out her reason for calling. She didn’t want the baby to grow up in secrecy, as someone’s whispered mistake. She wanted her children to know their sibling. She wanted there to be honesty and, if possible, peace.
“She deserves a family,” Kate said. “Even if the adults made a mess of things.”
The grace in that single sentence lodged itself in Rebecca’s chest.
For the first time in months, she didn’t feel like a villain. She felt like someone who still had a chance to do right.
But she left the café with more questions than answers—starting with the biggest one: what else had Jack lied about? If he could hide a finalized divorce for five months, what was stopping him from spinning more stories? And if he lied so easily, what kind of father would he be?
She still hasn’t told him about the meeting.
“I’m scared,” she admits. “Not of him yelling. I’m scared of finding out who he really is.”
With her due date approaching, Rebecca is standing at a crossroads. One path leads to raising the baby alone—clean break, clean conscience. The other involves navigating a complicated web of shared custody, old wounds, and a man she’s no longer sure she can trust. But the one thing that keeps echoing back to her is the look on Lily’s face when she talked about her future sibling—pure hope, untouched by the bitterness adults carry.
“They didn’t see me as the enemy,” Rebecca says. “They saw me as the mother of someone they already loved.”
There’s power in that. Healing, even.
Rebecca doesn’t pretend her choices were clean or admirable. She isn’t rewriting herself as the hero. She’s simply someone who made human, messy decisions—and is now trying to navigate the fallout with as much honesty as possible.
She knows she can’t undo the past. But maybe she can build a better future, shaped by courage instead of fear.
Kate chose grace. The children chose love. Now, Rebecca has to choose who she wants to be going forward.
And sometimes, the first step toward redemption is simply accepting the grace someone else was willing to give you